According to the legend, Lord Krishna would often entertain his sister Subhadra while she was pregnant with Abhimanyu. Once he told her the secret strategy to penetrate the battle formation called the chakravyuh. While he was telling her how to get past the seventh circle, Subhadra fell asleep, so Krishna stopped his narration. Abhimanyu, the story says, though he was still in the womb, heard the story and internalised its secrets. When he grew up, he became a great warrior. But when he attacked the chakravyuh that the Kaurava army formed in the battle of Kurukshetra, he could only get as far as the seventh circle.
Maharashtra is now using this story, and others like it, as part of another great battle, the one against malnutrition and maternal mortality. And the messengers are kirtankars, narrators of kirtans and abhangs, traditional devotional songs and ballads based on teachings from ancient scriptures and saints.
The Abhimanyu story, for instance, is used to drive home the message that a child’s brain is already developing in the womb, and that pregnant mothers should be treated with love and care. Kirtankars are now dispersing information about the importance of first 1000 days of life, starting from conception going up to two years of age. They use devotional songs to spread awareness about the importance of breast feeding, nutrition for mother and child and other dos and don’ts that need to be adopted to curb malnutrition.
The initiative is called MAA, short for Mothers Absolute Affection, and it is being run by the state government’s Rajmata Jijau Mother-Child Health and Nutrition Mission. So far, over 350 kirtankars have been trained in day-long workshops in Bhandhara, Akola and Parbhani. They get a 36-page booklet with the texts of abhangs (devotional poetry) and passages by Dyaneshwar, Tukaram, Ramdas, Mutkabai, Namdev and Tukdoji, as well as from the Mahabharata. According to the state government, there are an estimated one lakh kirtankars. Each one holds a minimum of three kirtans daily, to audiences of 200 to 300 people each time.
“Earlier, kirtankars simply narrated these stories,” says Suprabha Agarwal, director of the mission. “But now, they are narrowing them down to the underlying message and linking it to the importance of nutrition to the child before and after birth and the mother. In rural areas, kirtankars command great respect and whatever they say is taken very seriously. So we decided a community-based approach that can go a long way.”
“When the aanganwadi workers preach these things, the elderly in the family simply ignore the advice,” says said Pandurang Sudame, UNICEF consultant from Aurangabad. “But when kirtankars preach something like this, the elderly people pass the message back home, saying ‘Maharaj has said this.’” [Kirtankars are addressed as Maharaj] Mr. Sudame, who designed the module after reading all the texts for over six months, says that there are many myths and misconceptions around the care of new-borns. Some believe that a new-born should be first given honey, water or sugar syrup, “but the reality is that the baby should be breast fed within the first hour and thereafter for six months the baby should only be given mothers milk and not even water.”
Sudame says this message is driven home through another story about how after Krishna was born in prison, he is taken to Yashoda; though she owned cattle, she breastfed the infant, showing how important this is for the health and growth of the baby. Another passage in Dyaneshwari states that during stanpan , breastfeeding, the mother should pamper the baby and have interesting conversations with him or her, which helps in the baby’s intellectual development.
Osmanabad-based kirtankar Prakash Bhodale Maharaj, who is president of the 11,000-member Akhil Bhartiya Warkari Mandal, says, “We have propagated social causes like cleanliness and curbing female foeticide in the past, and it had definitely made a difference. We are apolitical people, and we disperse information about god and saints. So people listen to us.”
